Public Enemy (12 page)

Frankie, the owner, who’d introduced himself when we arrived, stopped me in the wood-paneled hallway. “Yo,” he said, our eyes level, his face close to mine. “What’s the celebration?” His salt-and-pepper hair was slicked back, his body broad and muscled, and he had no neck. It was an uncomfortably narrow hallway. But his tone was curious and friendly, not the least bit menacing, as if he wanted some reason to join in and share the collective joy. I hesitated, wanting to avoid Brinks, the Black Liberation Army, and the Weather Underground just now, swallowed hard, and settled on an abbreviated version of the truth. “My wife just got out of prison,” I said. “Federal lockup.”

“No shit!” he said, his eyes bulged as his voice lowered to conspiracy-level. “That lovely lady over there?” He cocked his head toward Bernardine, covered with kids. “Yes, that’s her,” I said. “What was she in for?” he asked, wrinkling his brow, curious and quite friendly still, and then, apologetically, “that is, if you don’t mind my asking.”

I swallowed hard once more and plunged on but still in short form, avoiding the content of the case. “She refused to talk to a federal grand jury,” I said. “She refused to cooperate.”

“No shit!” he repeated emphatically, astonishment mixed with awe. The content seemed to matter not a whit to him. “No shit!” His voice rising in admiration, he added, “Beautiful! Good for her! She’s a real stand-up chick!”

“Yes, she is,” I said.

And Frankie picked up the check.

There was no accessible mass movement sweeping us forward and illuminating our demands for peace and justice at that moment, no unifying focus, nor any widespread, palpable sense that if we could just muster ourselves up and storm the heavens, another world was in fact within our reach. But Bernardine and I agreed with our old friend Myles Horton, who’d always said that in every social movement there were bound to be valley times as well as mountain times. During mountain times, the popular struggle is visible, explosive, and the momentum of the movement creates a range of spaces to enter and to participate; the challenge of the slower and seemingly silent valley times is to prepare for the inevitable propulsive upheavals to come—and they
will
come, they surely will come.

But those were valley times, and we dug in.

Our political outlook was what it always had been: still opposed to imperialism and its evil twin, white supremacy; still believing that capitalism had exhausted itself and was in its dying moment and most dangerous zombie stage; still certain that the political class was corrupt and without a single answer to the gathering crises. All of that combined with a strong reserve of romance and idealism—not the dreamy sort, but an idealism edged with pain and urgency; not a barricaded retreat, but a living sense that there are ideals worth striving for in this wicked, wounded world. I was still hopeful for a freer and more peaceful future, a world more joyful and just than the one we’d inherited. We were also now a lot more agnostic about how to get there, and because we were unsure, Bernardine and I divided up our forces and attended every demonstration, every meeting, and every conference of the Left. You take the kids on Saturday and I’ll go to the organizing meeting, or I’ll take the kids to their swimming lessons and you go to the conference, or let’s pack a picnic and take the kids to the rally in Washington Square Park. And so it went, day by day.

One day I stood right outside the front gates of Stateville Correctional Center as the State of Illinois willfully murdered John Wayne Gacy Jr. I’d come to witness and protest the execution.

John Wayne Gacy Jr. had been projected onto our collective screens as a monster of mythic proportions, and at the time of his state-sanctioned murder was the reigning poster boy for the wisdom of the death penalty in Illinois. Serial killer, violent rapist, sociopath, fiendish slayer of at least thirty-three teenage boys and young men over the period of a decade, Gacy had buried twenty-six of his victims in the crawl space of his home and discarded the remains of his last four known victims in a nearby river. He had run his own construction business in suburban Chicago and dressed up as an affable clown he called Pogo to perform at charitable events and children’s parties. He was a lurid nightmare come to life, so when the ogre was finally trapped and condemned, the cheering crowd, led by the media and the political class, was unrestrained.

Bernardine and I didn’t join the mob; we’d been instinctive abolitionists forever and the identity of the perpetrator/victim changed nothing for us. The death penalty was legal, it’s true, and also intentional, deliberate, calculated, and considered—planned, premeditated, and purposeful—all of which made the killing that much more barbaric and inexcusable. It was well known that public hangings did nothing to prevent the acts of a psychopath or the murderous outbursts of spontaneous passion. The bad guy—in this case, the monster—was already captured and caged; no more harm was anticipated or possible, so the authorized execution merely added to the coarseness and cruelty of our already violent culture. The elaborate machinery of death, finally, served only one purpose: it fed our repulsive penchant for vengeance. It was morally indefensible.

We were sickened for days by the gleeful anticipation of Gacy’s appointment with death beaming through our radio, and when the day finally arrived, Bernardine and I looked at each other and quickly agreed that one of us had to go down that night to bear witness and stand in opposition.

After the kids were asleep, we made a cardboard sign—“Thou Shalt Not Kill”—and drew straws. I won, and Bernardine sent me off to Stateville without a plan or any idea what to expect.

As I drew close to the prison, traffic on the two-lane highway thickened and then clogged up, so I pulled onto the shoulder and parked in the middle of a tangle of cars and pick-up trucks. I joined the crowds surging toward the prison as rock music blared from boom boxes: “Pray,” “I’m Too Sexy,” and “Hold On.” There was beer and marijuana everywhere, and young people carried homemade signs and stretched painted banners from trees to trucks:
No tears for the clown
, said one.
Who’s laughing now?
said another. I kept my little counter-sign folded under my vest as I made my way for over a mile toward the front gates, the party intensifying and the chanting increasing with every step:
Burn, baby, burn! Burn, baby, burn!

When I finally arrived, my natural crew was easy to spot: nine elderly nuns with candles standing in a circle singing “We Are a Gentle, Loving People.” Two lawyers were there as well: Larry Marshall, a colleague of Bernardine’s at Northwestern School of Law, and Michelle Oberman, a brilliant feminist legal scholar teaching at DePaul. I pulled out my sign and was welcomed into the round as I joined the singing.

I’d felt marginal and lonely and practically invisible in my dissent before, but this was as severe an instance as I could remember: thousands of people rallying in support of a popular court decision and the mandated action of the state, and perhaps a dozen of us standing up to say NO!

Sometime after midnight, Gacy’s death was announced. A massive cheer went up as the nuns kneeled to pray. I said good-bye and headed for home. There’d been no calculus of success in my presence nor in the presence of the other protestors. There was no expectation of victory that had drawn any of us to that place on that night—Gacy would die, some sick bloodlust would be served, the mechanics of criminal injustice would grind forward, and we would return home and resume our lives.

And yet . . . even though lawmakers wouldn’t know we’d been there, even though the general population might not notice, and even though the death penalty would go on and on forever, it seemed, being there was somehow essential. I knew who I was then, I knew where I stood. I knew that in a society that legalized murder, I’d refused to go along.

I drove home feeling sad but honorable.

And within a few months, a miracle: Larry Marshall won the first wrongful conviction action for a Death Row inmate and the floodgates opened. Activists like Alice Kim united with parents of inmates and began to organize a movement, journalists from the
Chicago
Tribune
and Northwestern’s journalism school took up the serious task of investigating and shining a light into that darkness, and Larry and his colleagues began to win case after case. Soon the die was cast, and our corrupt and mildly right-wing governor became an abolitionist and emptied Death Row. But none of that was on the table as we stood in a circle of candles, singing softly against the storm.

When I published
Fugitive Days
, my memoir of the wretched years of the American war in Viet Nam and the sparkling resistance that blossomed in response, it felt like all hell broke loose. I woke up before dawn on September 11, 2001, the official publication date, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the second stop on a scheduled thirty-five-city book tour. I’d begun the journey the night before in East Lansing with an overflow crowd at a spirited independent bookstore. The book had been generously endorsed by Studs Terkel, Edward Said, Rosellen Brown, Scott Turow, and Tom Frank, who told me with a wink, “If the
New York Times
gives it a positive review, we can’t be friends anymore.” The first reviews were already in—delightfully, amazingly positive. Zayd, now an artist and playwright beginning his career, had warned me to ignore the reviews, and never, ever try to analyze them. “If they’re positive, just figure someone liked your book for whatever reason,” he cautioned. “If they’re negative, someone didn’t like it so much. Those are the only two choices, and everything else is autobiography—don’t get into motives, don’t try to explain or defend, just move on and write your next book.” I remembered a story about the actor Kirk Douglas working in mid-career with the older, renowned Sir John Gielgud and telling the old man that he’d gotten to the point in his career where the criticism no longer devastated him. Gielgud replied, “You’re almost there; now don’t let the praise seduce you.” Good advice, no doubt, but those first reviews felt wonderfully seductive, and so I read each one twice.

Hunter S. Thompson had offered his endorsement months earlier in a tightly packed, handwritten love letter and screed with long rants and plenty of ellipses as well as unforgettable HST phrases like “More chilling than being held hostage in a Mexican whorehouse” and “an orgy of enthusiasms, and a dangerous invitation to a CIA-hit.” His letter ended on a positive note: “Tell Ayers to stop by if he’s ever in the neighborhood—he can bring the heavy stuff; I’ve got the firearms.” He was kidding, I think, but a few months later I did stop by—without anything volatile—to meet the legend. I’m still recovering from an evening in his fun house.

But the book was generating a lot of hopeful buzz for my publisher right then: the
New York
Times
would review it for sure and run a feature in its Arts section. The
Chicago
Tribune
would run a front page review and a cover story in its weekend magazine. I’d be a featured writer at the Chicago Public Library, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the South Carolina Humanities Festival, and the Los Angeles Public Library, among others. And I was scheduled to be interviewed by Scott Simon, Terry Gross, Tavis Smiley, and Bob Edwards. The paperback rights had been sold to Penguin a few days earlier, Steppenwolf was talking about film rights, and, based on early sales figures, the book was already scheduled for a second printing. The evening in East Lansing was pulsing with good energy. Up, up, and away.

I bought the
Times
around 6:00 a.m. and headed over to a campus coffee shop. I opened the paper, and there on the front page of the Arts section was a big picture of Bernardine and me sitting on our front steps in Hyde Park—she looked elegant as always, and I, well, I looked as usual like her porter or her driver, and damned lucky to be there at that. The article was by Dinitia Smith, who had interviewed each of us extensively, and had even come to our home and met our roommates, Dorothy Dohrn, Bernardine’s mom, and Florence Garcia, her steady caregiver. I liked Smith even though she repeatedly referred to Florence as our “housekeeper” and showed decidedly less interest in the people in the house than in the house itself: “The ceilings are so high,” she remarked several times. “Yes, they are; it’s not Manhattan, you know.” “You certainly don’t live like Weathermen,” she said. I wondered what Weathermen lived like. The reporter who interviewed me from
Chicago
magazine had told me that I didn’t “look anything like a
real
Weatherman.” I asked her what a real Weatherman looked like, and we laughed together. She reported that, for Weathermen, Bernardine and I had raised three remarkable young men, though I was unsure what parenting skills and dispositions distinguished the Weatherparents from anyone else. The title of the
Times
piece was pretty dopey: “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives.” “No Regrets” had been the headline of the
Chicago
article about the book the week before, and Smith had stayed in the home of the
Chicago
writer and editor on her overnight to interview us—they had high ceilings too, she told me.

The article seemed OK to me, but when I called Bernardine an hour later, she didn’t think it was OK at all. “The headline is not
dopey
; it’s
disturbing
,” she said. She read aloud a single sentence: “Even today, he finds ‘a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,’ he writes.” This supports the “love affair with bombs” thesis, Bernardine pointed out, but “it’s completely dishonest—you don’t write that
you
find any eloquence in bombs.” True: I’d written that the American war-makers—the cozy corps of Dr. Strangeloves and Brigadier General Jack D. Rippers—seemed to hear a joyful noise while bombing villages from forty thousand feet, and that that was perverse and disgusting. But no matter—let people read the book and see for themselves, I said.

It was all a little silly and forgettable, mildly irritating, and sure to quickly fade away. I was wrong, of course, for the known world was about to blow up, and
love of explosives
and
no regrets
would be infused with fresh meaning and new urgency.